If we never deny / the inevitable end / of the story, / we will write it / more beautiful / while we’re alive.
– Andrea Gibson, from Time Piece, in You Better Be Lightning (page 21)
I saw clouds the specific color of antifreeze as I jogged into the woods this morning, which confirmed that despite the calendar, today is our first taste of winter. Temperature in the upper twenties, which equaled the wind’s miles per hour, so the math equation determined that it felt like thirteen outdoors. I went out overdressed but unashamed.
When we first considered Wisconsin, I heard that the people here tend to embrace the winter rather than simply endure it, which I later discovered to be true. Instead of hunkering down for survival, Wisconsinites engage in winter festivals, winter sports, and carry on age-old winter traditions. I like the entire idea, especially as I grow older.
I am fifty-five years old now and wondering how that happened. Age is relative, of course, but my parents passed in their seventies, so it isn’t crazy to guess about twenty years remaining in this hotel stay called life.
Until recently, I had generally been the youngest person in a room. I was a late-in-life child and the youngest in my family. My birthday fell so that I was always the youngest in my class, starting kindergarten at age four and college at seventeen, and I was still twenty-one when I became a high school coach and teacher.
I married at twenty-three and with it had the crazy-cool (but still crazy) opportunity to be a parent for the sweetest little seven-year-old, and to make it even more outrageous, a year or so later my wife and I became full-time “houseparents” for courageous teenagers overcoming troubled pasts. We were always the “young” parents for all of the people we have considered “our kids” regardless of where their lives started.
Over and over and over again, I felt young for fill-in-the blank. I was in my late twenties when I completely switched careers to lead an entire church. To just be gross, I had a colonoscopy in my thirties, one thing I wished had been more age appropriate. My dad died when I was twenty-four, and my mom died when I was forty-one, which to me surely felt too young to be the top branch on a family tree.
The first chink in my youthful armor came when I went to law school in my late thirties, but even then, although I joked about being old all the time, the truth was that going to school in sweatshirts and blue jeans with a group of generous young folks who treated me as a colleague made me feel like a kid again.
I guess it was about three years ago when the shift happened. I was a member of a college president’s cabinet at the time, and I recall the day that I looked around the room and noticed that I was one of the oldest there. That felt so bizarre, but that feeling has happened so often since that it is now familiar.
Recently, Jody and I started talking a bit about retirement. You have no idea how unusual that is for us. My standing joke is that one thing we have always agreed on in our marriage is making poor financial choices for our future. But, truth be told, my approach to my own faith never made the words “wealth accumulation” super interesting, and I actually like to work. Add in my suspicion that I won’t live forever, and the idea of retirement never garnered much attention. But suddenly, we find ourselves talking about it some. Maybe in ten or fifteen years if all goes well…
All this has me thinking about embracing the coming winter.
I do love the fall season, but there is a reason that the leaves transform in blazing beauty and then fall to the earth en masse. The trees lose energy and nutrients, which produces gorgeous colors and signals that the leaves won’t survive. Those brilliant colors soon fade, and the trees are laid bare for the dark, cold winter.
So what posture should we adopt for the winter that approaches in our own lives? Not a popular conversation opener for a cocktail party, I suppose, but since I have never been a fan of living in denial, I choose to consider it anyway.
I like the idea of embracing it. Not hunkering down and withering away. Well, withering away may not be optional, but I like the idea of somehow withering with one’s head held high (as possible).
Bears hibernate in winter, but everyone here in Packer Country hates (the Chicago) bears anyway, so I am in friendly territory to adopt a different approach. I am grateful to my friend Mikey for introducing me to the incredible poetry of Andrea Gibson recently, and her conclusion to Time Piece encapsulates what I want to say—and do: “If we never deny the inevitable end of the story, we will write it more beautiful while we’re alive.”
Yes, that’s it. Seeing the coming winter with clear eyes creates space for something more beautiful. Winter approaches, and that is okay.
We crossed the Mississippi River bridge in Memphis in the rental car, ironically a Malibu, and remembered what the Arkansas Delta looks like in early winter. Many of the trees had long ago shed their leaves leaving cold bare branches that reach toward the sky, and those still holding leaves that had only recently been brilliant reds, yellows, and oranges had faded to the color of rust and stood clustered together for warmth next to the brown dirt of the silent farmland. The winter sun was setting, and it looked as if someone had plastic-wrapped the entire pastel sky. It isn’t your typical picture of natural beauty, but I now find it strangely wonderful.
Starting to Look Up 